#24. Weekly Round Up. Am I too romantic about future of media and Web4.0?

Hello, this is Sergei.

I’ve read Web4.0 manifest.

I still don’t believe in a future where AI fully creates, reads, and engages with content for itself while humans simply watch from the side. What feels more realistic for me is the emergence of two parallel content systems:

• a human system, where content is created for people, with context, intent, and real value

• an AI system, where content is processed, synthesized, and used to make machines more useful for us

In that sense, maybe what we are seeing right now is a kind of universal sandbox — a big experimental layer filled with low-value content that AI systems learn from and that will eventually be cleaned up. Because honestly, a lot of AI-generated content today still feels like a fun game to play.

We’re all playing with the tools, generating texts, posts, summaries, images, and endless derivatives. But I suspect we need to go through this phase fully to understand its limits. At some point, the industry (and what is more important — the audience) will realize that volume without value is just noise. And right now the amount of this noise is enormous. In many spaces it already overshadows content that actually matters.

Maybe I’m too optimistic (or even too romantic), but I still believe that eventually some kind of “overall editor” layer will emerge. Whether it’s human curation, algorithmic filtering, or a mix of both, low-quality content will be filtered out because it simply creates no value. In the long run, I still believe the value-first approach wins.

And I have some news about AI For Newsroom. I've updated it a lot. So now we have:

- LLM tracker

I’ve selected 38 LLMs that are particularly strong for editorial and management tasks. We now track their updates, as well as token pricing — across both commercial and open-source models.

- ROI calculator

You can now input a few details about your newsroom and get an estimate of how much time and money AI implementation could save.

- AI policy generator

Need a newsroom AI policy? You can now generate a version tailored to your workflow — or simply download the raw template and adapt it yourself.